The framing is wrong, harmful, and anti-democratic

Luis Villa’s points are so well put that I just had to copy and blog immediately. The specific context is not needed for the points are apropos to nearly all contemporary info policy discourse — recall the 2003 Benkler excerpt I emphasized a few posts ago:

Although the claim that the Internet leads to some form or another of “decentralization” is not new, the fundamental role played in this transformation by the emergence of non-market, nonproprietary production and distribution is often over-looked, if not willfully ignored.

The framing is wrong – it should be “production models”, or “sustainability models”, not “business models” – the assumption that production of copyrighted works has to happen through “business” is a harmful and anti-democratic in an age where every citizen has access to tools that can publish to the entire world.

Ditto use of “the industry”, as if “the industry” is the only meaningful producer of content. (Really, these two points alone could make for a great blog post; this paper is far from the only one that makes these two mistakes but is particularly blatant in use of the framing.)

In part as a result of this framing, it is sad but not surprising that no citizen/public interest groups were consulted in the creation of the material. Not sure we’d want to say that to them publicly, but if we decide not to offer informal comment I’d want to say that publicly in a blog post when this is published.

If the purpose of the observatory is to study infringement, then clearly peer production should be listed as a “business model” and the infringement of peer-produced material should be treated on a par with material produced through the other production models. I’m sure this group can come up with examples of infringement of our material and of other peer-produced content.

Music: no mention of tools like Soundcloud (.de-based!) that are intended to democratize music creation and publication.

Video: no mention of how Youtube/Vimeo has created a vast amount of non-industry video content creation, or of regular traditional media industry infringement of citizen-created video without penalty or concern. (If we wanted to write this up formally for them, we’d want to find some examples of this.)

Sports: I can’t speak to the EU, but in the US, fan-created commentary (such as sbnation.com) is now a huge source of reporting on sports news, often delivering better quality than the traditional news sources. Probably not directly relevant to this section, though (unless there have been legal threats in the EU around fan-provided live-streaming commentary).

Social media: with regards to 4.7 (news/social media), it should be noted that social media probably disproportionately *helps* peer-produced media, since that historically has very few resources to use for marketing/distribution, and so must rely on word-of-mouth.

Sec. 4 and 5 consider “news” and “books”; amazingly, neither consider new text-centric methods of production of copyrighted works, like wikis or blogs. Again shows how blind this is to the actual innovation happening in the content space.

Books: no mention that technical protection measures have encouraged monopolization of the distribution channels, to the detriment of traditional distribution channels and to blossoming antitrust problems in the US (and presumably soon in the EU).

6.2: a mention of communities! But on cue, statement that these authors may not be being remunerated, as if remuneration was the only potential goal for creators. Youtube gets mentioned here, but not in Sec. 1 (Music) or Sec. 2 (Audiovisual), which is insane.

Sec. 8, video games: no mention that this is a golden era for independently-produced games. Not sure that fits our narrative very well, at least not without a lot of explanation.

B2B Services: this feels overly focused on remuneration/commercial licensing; I suppose that is inevitable to some extent, but it seems like it would be worth noting the increased options for free, high-quality content that business can use (e.g., Flickr photos and Commons for stock photography).

“The fact that the legal offers is at least as diverse as the illegal one” – ahhahahhahahhahaha. Really, it is quite amazing that they think that providing a “portal” will increase awareness of legal content. The best way to increase awareness of legal content is to provide it legally online and advertise it as such…

Near the end of the my recent post linked above:

Commons-based product competition simultaneously changes the facts on the ground, the range of policies imaginable, and potentially create a commons “industrial” interest group which is recognizably important to regulators and makes commons-based peer production favoring policy central to its demands — the likely Wikimedia response to the European Commission copyright consultation is a hopeful example.

That response has been drafted by Villa and others involved in Wikimedia movement advocacy. I highly recommend the advocacy advisors mailing list, where Villa posted the points above, to anyone interested in changing the framing.

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[…] the past to those who now use it to control the future. Some short term and narrow but valuable pro-commons policy suggestions arising from the Wikimedia movement; the free software movement offers other suggestions, if we […]